RSS + SEO
September 19th, 2006
I was asked this question the other day – how does RSS and SEO work.
A good starting point – read this post from Stephen Spencer.
He offers great advice on
1. own your own feed url 2. ping services and 3. auto-discovery.
To push the envelope out a bit, people should pay attention to what Google are up to.
The Google Base project is the key to marketers. This quote from a recent analyst conference call with Google management on Google Base
“Through that integration, the overall Google experience will become much more structured, much more refined, and much more precise. It’s a real improvement in end-user quality.”
John Battelle has 2 great examples – Real Estate and Travel of what this looks like in Google Search.
See this example source for the “Travel” category
Jeremy Zawadony of Yahoo has some interesting comments on Google Base + SEO
“Is my money better spent on Search Engine Optimization techniques and advertising, or should I be paying someone to build tools that make it easy to get my data loaded directly into Google Base (and kept up-to-date)?”
The one negative on Google Base is the lock in – you put data into Google Base, but you can only retrieve with Google APIs – GData – which has all the hallmarks of a “lock-in” or mousetrap.
ZDNet has a great article on how Google are extending RSS (ATOM) through GData.
For some additional background on the Google strategy, you should listen to the Adam Bosworth podcast (Adam is VP, Engineering at Google, and was one of the top Engineers at Microsoft)
The real alternate to the “silo” mentality of Google Base is Microformats – this is “edge feeding” at its best.
Jeff Jarvis has a great discussion on this Google Base vs Microformats.
In Summary
- Marketers need to offer feeds on per product/brand/category basis - These feeds need to support additional attributes from google base, microformats, etc. - You need the ability to track where you’re getting results
If you want to avoid all the technology mayhem, and just want results – feel free to contact nooked
Tags: microformats, rss, gdata, google base, nooked
March 2nd, 2007 at 03:09 PM I find that google puts rss ahead of html in search results. Hope you get a chance to blog again... I hate silence ;-)
March 15th, 2007 at 10:18 AM Good insight on the subject. It will be interesting what camp 'wins'. Methinks both will. RSS has more openness and easier to use (including tools from vendors to help u along your way). SEO is nearly always the better answer (from a findability aspect) but requires a lot of word, diligence and constant tweaking that comes at a higher price. I like RSS will become the "new search" over time. The "local" sector is going 2b a huge battle but none of the major players yet have any stanglehold on the market. Google seems 2 have the best 'PR' with its Base product but don't underestimate Microsoft. Yahoo these days seems 2b the dark-horse and we're all hoping it will break out of the stalls one of these days! Lal